They would ask me what actors I saw in the roles. I would tell them, and they’d say “Oh that’s interesting.” And that would be the end of it.
--Elmore Leonard, in 2000, on the extent of his input for Hollywood's adaptation of his novels

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Jon Keller's "Of Sea and Cloud"

Jon Keller is the author of the novel Of Sea and Cloud. He holds an MFA from Boise State University. After graduate school, he moved to a remote stretch of the Maine coast and spent several years working aboard a lobster boat and writing for a commercial fishing newspaper. Now a clam digger, he divides his time between Maine and Montana.

Here Keller dreamcasts an Of Sea and Cloud adaptation:

I’m not much of a movie watcher—though I love them, I don’t live in a place conducive to watching many. I now live aboard a boat, and before that in an isolated cabin, so my power supply is limited, as is my internet service.

That said, the actor that pops into my head concerning Of Sea and Cloud is Daniel Day-Lewis as Osmond Randolph. I see Osmond as a huge, epic sort—ideally, of a stature akin with “The Butcher” in Gangs of New York. They look a bit the same, too, now that I think about it…

“Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough.”
--Louis de Bernières, author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin